The Pleasures of Incompetence

In praise of after school classes for adults

My children are terribly embarrassed by me. I am the kind of mother who ambushes their annual piano recital. This is an event they are less-than-enthusiastic about, even without the prospect of their quadragenarian mother taking her place between the pods of Pachelbel playing primary school kids and belting out a slightly-off-key, chords-heavy, rendition of Hotel California.

For the last two years I’ve been spending 15 minutes a week with the boys’ piano teacher learning the chords to pop songs I like singing. The results are joyous for me, although going by the echoes of doors being slammed shut around the house when I practice, less joyous for my family.

I am not going to be a rock star, but I bet the rush I get when I hit the high notes of “The House of the Rising Sun,” are rock star-like. The adoring fans might be in my head, but the endorphins are real.

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Most of us labour under the misconception that extracurricular activities are what you do in school. Many of us had dance lessons, painting classes, swimming camps and so on thrust upon us as children.

The reason our parents spent the money and effort on these classes wasn’t usually because we displayed any remarkable talent for them, but because they saw some value in the process of learning skills.

I’ve always wondered why it is that as adults we seem to stop valuing that learning, age-restricting it to childhood, when it is least appreciated. I suppose it’s because as adults we focus on the skills we are already good at –writing, accounting, engineering, diagnosing infectious diseases and on, as the case may be.

We constrain our appetite for the joy of being “bad” at new skills because we assume that learning complicated new stuff that we’ll never become proficient at, is a waste. Children are time-rich and therefore have plenty of it to waste. Adults, or so the thinking goes, must be more parsimonious with their time (although curiously watching Netflix is often exempted from this stricture).

Any such notion is stuff and nonsense.

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This post is a plea to its readers to forthwith abandon overrated commitment to excellence and to start living alternative futures as bumbling bakers, dreadful drummers, pointless poets, or awkward alpine skiers.

I’ve done lots of serious work in my life. Interviewed presidents and princes, traveled to fancy locations to participate in literature festivals, written books, taught seminars, dare I say - given policy-making a nudge on occasion. I am one of those annoying people who can say that they “feel blessed” because they actually enjoy their work.

But while competence has its pleasures, so does incompetence. Over the years I have become an inept tango dancer (in Beijing), community-choir singer (in Jakarta), taiko (Japanese drumming) player (in Tokyo) and pianist (in Tokyo-Madrid). During the first COVID lockdown I also began to fumble my way through recipe books and can now make edible versions of various Fuschia Dunlop recipes.

In Japan, getting ready for our annual taiko performance

What else? I practice yoga, although my tree pose is as wobbly as a mochi. Oh, and as you already know, I am very good at barely making myself understood in a variety of languages.

A really bad crow pose

I’ve also been learning flamenco for the last few months. Cue: more embarrassment on the part of the kids as I practice footwork while waiting with them at the bus stop for the school bus to arrive.

Flamenco in the wilds of Extremadura

Not that attempting to learn difficult things in middle-age is all fun and games. It’s often frustrating and/or annoying. Your body no longer listens to its brain like it once did. I can clearly see myself bending into chakrasana (wheel pose) with nymph-like agility, but my back has a serious disagreement with my mind’s eye.

Trying to disassociate my right hand from my left while playing piano feels like squaring a circle. And figuring out whether to conjugate a Spanish verb in the preterite or the imperfect makes my brain short circuit - like there is a mental bang, explosion, and then nothing, but a sliver of smoke.

But there is satisfaction in perseverance and discipline and the small victories. Conquering a few seconds of complicated flamenco footwork, for example, brings a joy that is disproportionate to the achievement.

In my professional life, the inverse is true. There is diminishing happiness attached to success. At this point I need to win serious accolades for a book to feel “happy” about it. But if my boys gobble down my experimental pasta, it’s enough to send me to bed with a smile.

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Last week I’d asked you to get ready to share photos, videos, anecdotes of your “bad” accomplishments in the comments section of this post. Do! I can’t wait to see what you’ve all been up to.

Next week I will talk about the surprising global trajectories of certain foods. Did you think tempura was Japanese? If so, come back and read next week’s post for a surprise. 

Until then xoxo

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